December 21, 2009

The littlest things

[Warning: Contents may cause excruciating boredom.]
I switched from Microsoft Entourage (sorry, old friend) to Apple Mail a few weeks ago*, and I’m almost embarrassed to note my favorite “feature”: Mail doesn’t abusively “help” me by inserting a space before pasted text. Entourage would drive me crazy with that behavior, especially when putting URLs between parenthesis.
On the other hand, I loved how Entourage would auto-insert the correct accent when I’d type “vis-à-vis” (<–pretentious much? sorry). Maybe more importantly, when I'd tab from the address field to the message body, Entourage would remember the previously active insertion point in the body text. (Who cares? I care, as apparently I tweak addresses/subject lines with some frequency.) And Entourage would also keep everybody on the "To" line when replying to all.
Why am I boring you with this? Okay, yes, things are a bit quiet in the office today, but I also want you to know that I'm a perfectionist. I'm writing up a long and hopefully thoughtful piece about the Photoshop UI (responding to recent posts**), and “sweating the details” is a big, big deal to me–and to many of my colleagues. More interesting bits to come.*Why? By not relying on one giant database, Mail should play better with Time Machine (and, I’m hoping, be less vulnerable to global freak-outs).
** Let’s not try to delve into a discussion of those other points yet. Sit tight. I’m writing a lot.